1. Field of the Invention
The present invention is generally related to wired and wireless networking and is more specifically related to transparent bridging of communication channel segments.
2. Related Art
A wireless network is typically an unreliable medium for packet data communication. This is generally true because packet loss rates and latency are higher in wireless networks compared to wired networks with equivalent bandwidth. However, significant cost savings can be achieved by implementing wireless networks rather than wired networks. One such sector where significant savings can be achieved is in the building automation control network (“BACnet”) field, using building automation protocols such as BACnet, Lonworks, ARCnet, RS485, RS232 or any other building automation protocol.
Unfortunately, wireless networks are poor solutions for building automation/BACnet implementations because building automation/BACnet requires reliable packet delivery at low latencies. For example, BACnet master-slave-token-passing (“MSTP”) requires reliable packet delivery. This reliability is divided into a certain amount of time for the device to respond (Tusage_delay) and a certain amount of time to transmit the data (Tusage_delay+Tusage_timeout). In BACnet/MSTP, the network transmission time can be no worse than 5 ms. Therefore, conventional wireless communication networking technologies are unsuited for BACnet applications and what is needed is a system and method that overcomes the significant problems described above.